New Releases by Diane Ackerman

A vivid and groundbreaking tour of the senses, full of cutting-edge science and thrilling anecdotes, that reveals how they shape our lives and the way we experience the world around us—by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Natural History of the Senses A Feast in Every Sense is Diane Ackerman''s luscious and tender journey into the mystery of our modern sensory lives, a grand tour that captures the heady feelings of being alive. She introduces us to receptors that create the creamy sensation of a perfectly ripe avocado, sound waves that allow us to identify hot versus cold water by sound alone, skin sensors that lower pain and change brain chemistry at a lover''s touch. The sensory universe colors every morsel of human existence. Why does sitting in a hard chair make you a harder bargainer? Why does Tylenol decrease empathy? Why does sipping a bitter drink invite harsher moral judgments? How does the time of day you receive a flu vaccine or an organ transplant affect its success? Is airplane food really that dull, or do our cravings and sense of taste warp at altitude? What sensory rebels have lived at the frontiers of perception? So many mysteries, good and bad, can only be understood through our senses. Ackerman also uses new scientific discoveries, like our host of Secret Senses—ever-vigilant scouts—to explain life''s intricacies and understand how the world''s endless stimuli combine with our inner lives to form our deepest thoughts, feelings, hardships and joys. Blending history, science, personal experience, and a poet''s eye, A Feast in Every Sense is both an ambrosial display of how we process the beauty around us and a call to rediscover what it means to be fully embodied and alive in a world brimming with wonders.

From Marginalian Editions comes a gorgeous reissue of celebrated poet, essayist, and naturalist Diane Ackerman’s debut collection: a whimsical and wonderful ode to our solar system, planet to planet, blending science and imagination, astronomy and cosmology, as well as fantasy, satire, myth, confession, and bawdiness galore. First published in 1973, The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral introduced not only a splendid new poet but a whole new adventure in poetry. With bravura style, unbridled imagination, and a connoisseur''s eye for precise scientific detail, Diane Ackerman gives us an unforgettable ode to each of the planets in our solar system, as well as for the moon, the comet Kohoutek, asteroids, and strange voyages to the stars, the bottom of the sea, through the human body, and into the mind. But The Planets is more than a book of poetry. It is also a major work on the solar system, illustrated with drawings and photographs of the galaxy. Diane Ackerman herself says: “I’ve always been baffled by people who write about nature only in terms of, say, junipers and cornfields, eschewing all things so-called ‘scientific,’ as if science were, per se, the spoil-sport of feeling. So wonderless a view of nature really doesn’t appeal to me; I don’t see the Universe divided up that way, into ‘The Junipers’ on the one hand and ‘The Amino Acids’ on the other.” Astronomy, fantasy, satire, myth, confession and bawdiness meet imagination and lyrical sweep to create this enticing collection, the world of The Planets.

Jan et Antonina Zabinski dirigent le zoo de Varsovie quand éclate la Seconde Guerre mondiale. La Pologne est envahie et bientôt règne la barbarie. Les animaux ont été tués sous les bombardements, envoyés à Berlin ou ont servi de gibier aux officiers allemands. Jan et Antonina se mettent alors à élever des porcs officiellement pour les troupes, officieusement pour nourrir les habitants du ghetto. Surtout, ils profitent d''un réseau de souterrains reliant les cages pour y cacher des juifs et les faire quitter le pays... Grâce au courage de ce couple, trois cents d''entre eux seront sauvés. Inspiré du journal intime d''Antonina Zabinski, ce récit retrace le combat d''un couple soucieux de la cause animale qui s''engage dans une lutte secrète contre l''oppression nazie. Un très beau portrait de femme, où l''abnégation et la générosité côtoient la cruauté et l''horreur.

Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award and the PEN New England Henry David Thoreau Prize. A dazzling, inspiring tour through the ways that humans are working with nature to try to save the planet. With her celebrated blend of scientific insight, clarity, and curiosity, Diane Ackerman explores our human capacity both for destruction and for invention as we shape the future of the planet Earth. Ackerman takes us to the mind-expanding frontiers of science, exploring the fact that the "natural" and the "human" now inescapably depend on one another, drawing from "fields as diverse as evolutionary robotics…nanotechnology, 3-D printing and biomimicry" (New York Times Book Review), with probing intelligence, a clear eye, and an ever-hopeful heart.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Zookeeper''s Wife, an ambitious and enlightening work that combines an artist''s eye with a scientist''s erudition to illuminate, as never before, the magic and mysteries of the human mind. Long treasured by literary readers for her uncommon ability to bridge the gap between art and science, celebrated scholar-artist Diane Ackerman returns with the book she was born to write. Her dazzling new work, An Alchemy of Mind, offers an unprecedented exploration and celebration of the mental fantasia in which we spend our days—and does for the human mind what the bestselling A Natural History of the Senses did for the physical senses. Bringing a valuable female perspective to the topic, Diane Ackerman discusses the science of the brain as only she can: with gorgeous, immediate language and imagery that paint an unusually lucid and vibrant picture for the reader. And in addition to explaining memory, thought, emotion, dreams, and language acquisition, she reports on the latest discoveries in neuroscience and addresses controversial subjects like the effects of trauma and male versus female brains. In prose that is not simply accessible but also beautiful and electric, Ackerman distills the hard, objective truths of science in order to yield vivid, heavily anecdotal explanations about a range of existential questions regarding consciousness, human thought, memory, and the nature of identity.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award "A testament to the power of creativity in language, life—and love." —Heller McAlpin, Washington Post It is a truism that lovers have their own language. And the love story—extending over more than forty years—of acclaimed writers Diane Ackerman and Paul West is equally a story of the love of language and its mysteries. In this heart-warming, uplifting memoir, Ackerman explores the brain’s ability to find and connect words—and of the latest science behind what happens when it fails to do so. Exposing both the terror of losing language and the giddy exhilaration of its recovery, Ackerman opens a window into the experience of wordlessness and testifies to the joyous necessity of wordplay for the health of both mind and spirit.

Diane Ackerman''s lusciously written grand tour of the realm of the senses includes conversations with an iceberg in Antarctica and a professional nose in New York, along with dissertations on kisses and tattoos, sadistic cuisine and the music played by the planet Earth. “Delightful . . . gives the reader the richest possible feeling of the worlds the senses take in.” —The New York Times

In A Natural History of the Senses Diane Ackerman revealed herself as a naturalist who writes with the sensuous immediately of a great poet. Now Jaguar of Sweet Laughter presents the work of a poet with the precise and wondering eye of a gifted naturalist. Ackermans''s Olympian vision records and transforms landscapes from Amazonia to Antarctica, while her imaginative empathy penetrates the otherness of hummingbirds, deer, and trilobites. But even as they draw readers into the wild heart of nature, Ackerman''s poems are indelible reminders of what it is to be a human being—the "jaguar of sweet laughter" that, according to Mayan mythology, astonished the world because it was the first animal to speak.

The renowned author of A Natural History of the Senses takes readers in search of the "rarest of the rare, " species likely to disappear before most of us have ever seen them. From Brazil to the Pacific to Japan, Ackerman shares her concern at the animals'' plight, rejoices at the chance to experience them, and cheers those who work to save these fantastic creatures.

A celebrated storyteller-poet-naturalist explores a year of dawns, drawing on sources as diverse as meteorology, world religion, etymology, art history, poetry, organic farming, and beekeeping.

The New York Times bestseller now a major motion picture starring Jessica Chastain. A true story in which the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo saved hundreds of people from Nazi hands. Jan and Antonina Zabinski were Polish Christian zookeepers horrified by Nazi racism, who managed to save over three hundred people. Yet their story has fallen between the seams of history. Drawing on Antonina’s diary and other historical sources, best-selling naturalist Diane Ackerman vividly re-creates Antonina’s life as “the zookeeper’s wife,” responsible for her own family, the zoo animals, and their “Guests”—Resistance activists and refugee Jews, many of whom Jan had smuggled from the Warsaw Ghetto. Ironically, the empty zoo cages helped to hide scores of doomed people, who were code-named after the animals whose names they occupied. Others hid in the nooks and crannies of the house itself. Jan led a cell of saboteurs, and the Zabinskis’ young son risked his life carrying food to the Guests, while also tending an eccentric array of creatures in the house. With hidden people having animal names, and pet animals having human names, it’s small wonder the zoo’s codename became “The House Under a Crazy Star.” Yet there is more to this story than a colorful cast. With her exquisite sensitivity to the natural world, Diane Ackerman explores the role of nature in both kindness and savagery, and she unravels the fascinating and disturbing obsession at the core of Nazism: both a worship of nature and its violation, as humans sought to control the genome of the entire planet.

The true story of how the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo saved hundreds of people from Nazi hands. When Germany invaded Poland, Stuka bombers devastated Warsaw--and the city''s zoo along with it. With most of their animals dead, zookeepers Jan and Antonina Żabiński began smuggling Jews into empty cages. Another dozen "guests" hid inside the Żabińskis'' villa, emerging after dark for dinner, socializing, and, during rare moments of calm, piano concerts. Jan, active in the Polish resistance, kept ammunition buried in the elephant enclosure and stashed explosives in the animal hospital. Meanwhile, Antonina kept her unusual household afloat, caring for both its human and its animal inhabitants--otters, a badger, hyena pups, lynxes--and keeping alive an atmosphere of play and innocence even as Europe crumbled around her.--From publisher description.

Mac guru Bill Atkinson shoots pictures of cut and polished rock slabs, transmuting them into masterpieces of "found" art with his high-resolution scanning camera and innovative color management techniques. For "Within the Stone," Atkinson picks 72 rock images for their evocative painterly qualities. Seven eminent poets and science writers, including Diane Ackerman and John Horgan, take turns responding to each image as a dream, landscape, seduction, or excogitative stimulus. In an appendix, three mineralogists describe each specimen''s provenience, geological setting, and mineral composition. "A beautiful work of art." "Gems & Gemology." "Abstract masterpieces." "Popular Photography." "Revelations of the inner beauty of rocks." "PC Photo" "High tech meets timeless beauty." "Lapidary Journal." "Apple''s soft ware star turns his code into art." "Macworld" Winner of 2004 Gold Ink Award, American Photo Best Photo Book of 2004

At the heart of Origami Bridges is the delicate relationship of trust between analyst and patient, a relationship that grows out of the emotional give-and-take of the psychoanalytic process. In this collection, Diane Ackerman, with astonishing candor, lays bare her desires, anger, jealousy, fears, and anxiety, as she probes not only her present emotional landscape but also her past. And what gradually rises to the surface is an understanding of how the poet uses verse to purge her demons, express her delight, or confess secret longing, and through this process come to a better understanding of the self.

Poems about the five senses as manifested in such animals as the star-nosed mole, bat, bee, swan, fly, and cow.

Exploratrice sensuelle, à la curiosité sans limites, Diane Ackerman lève ici le voile sur l''univers secret et intime des jardins. Dans la veine de son succès mondial, Une histoire naturelle des sens, elle en célèbre les délices, et raconte, avec intelligence et volupté, ses incursions dans le monde des simples. Savourant chaque plaisir en chaque saison, fière de la profusion de ses roses, occupée à étêter des marguerites, à abreuver un oiseau-mouche d''un peu d''eau sucrée ou à étudier une limace, elle se réjouit aussi bien des drames innatendus, de la prodigalité ou du refuge qu''offre tout jardin. Elle en tient la chronique émerveillée, des accès de violence aux gestations mystérieuses, sans oublier le vacarme qu''occasionne le désir des criquets mâles dans les matins printaniers. C''est en aventurière de son propre jardin, situé sur la côte est de l''Amérique, que Diane Ackerman nous initie, avec précision, lyrisme et exubérance, à la grande sagesse encyclopédique de la nature. Un hymne à ce royaume éternel où nous attend le bonheur.

作者融合詩人與科學家特色,在本書中歌誦在自家花園裡瘦現的感官之樂與四時之美

In her first new book of poetry since Jaguar of Sweet Laughter, poet and naturalist Diane Ackerman combines her deep understanding of the world with her immense passion for language to craft richly sensual poems that "honor all life/wherever and in whatever form/it may deal." Imbued with ravishing imagery, these exuberant and lyrical explorations of aging, longing, and death demonstrate Ackerman''s full engagement with every aspect of life''s process. Ackerman muses on the confines of therapy sessions, where she intersects "twice a week/in a painstaking hide-and-seek/making do with half-light, half-speak"; relishes the succulent pleasure of eating an apricot, with its "gush of taboo sweetness"; and imagines the "unupholstered voice, a life in outline" in her stunning elegy to C. S. Lewis. Whimsical, organic, and wise, the poems in I Praise My Destroyer affirm Ackerman''s place as one of the most enchanting poets writing today.

The national bestselling author of A Natural History of the Senses tackles the realm of creativity, by exploring one of the most essential aspects of our characters: the ability to play. "Deep play" is that more intensified form of play that puts us in a rapturous mood and awakens the most creative, sentient, and joyful aspects of our inner selves. As Diane Ackerman ranges over a panoply of artistic, spiritual, and athletic activities, from spiritual rapture through extreme sports, we gain a greater sense of what it means to be "in the moment" and totally, transcendentally human. Keenly perceived and written with poetic exuberance, Deep Play enlightens us by revealing the manifold ways we can enhance our lives.